Month: September 2015

That’s how long commercial emailers say it may take for an unsubscribe order to take effect. Others say 24 hours.

Non-commercial email list-servs, such as often come free with a cheap domain shared-hosting account, can process an unsub order in milliseconds.

My late mother-in-law was on a lot of commercial mailing lists. Hell, I’m on a lot of them, but I also work at controlling the volume. But now that I’m having her mail forwarded to me so that I can make sure important messages — from people who haven’t gotten the news, or don’t know how to contact next-of-kin — don’t sit unnoticed in an unchecked inbox, I’m having to send a lot of unsub orders.

Some outfits use a system that asks why you’re unsubscribing. At least one such continued sending well past the advertised waiting period, and I couldn’t resist invoking the old “Saturday Night Live” Franco gag. I like to think mom-in-law would have approved.

The volume is subsiding, gradually, but just now I had to tell another persistent shop that if I’m forced to start telling Gmail that their messages are spam, that could have implications beyond just one email address.

As easy as it is to get on these lists, there’s no excuse for this slow response time. It’s not as if these unsubscribe orders actually need to be processed by a human when a gnu can do it so much more efficiently.

Update: Forgot to mention, some of these businesses make it hard to even submit an unsub order. Those I’m just sending straight to spam from now on.

As aggressively as Alaska is marketed as a Last Frontier where the rugged individualist reigns supreme, it has collectivist quirks written right into its state constitution.

You can own land, and outside of congested areas you can do with it pretty much as you please; you can drill a well for water and install a septic tank with no more red tape than you’d expect in any other state. There is — or was, things may have changed — an organized borough where you wouldn’t even have to pay property tax.

But aside from the water, nothing below the surface is yours. That all belongs to the state government. Because the state’s “Founding Fathers” decided that what had gone wrong in the Lower 48 over the previous few decades — we’re talking about the mid-1950s here, so their experience extended through the Great Depression — was caused by private property rights extending too far.

This means that those with the resources to extract and market Alaska’s mineral wealth have only one vendor to deal with: Juneau. When I was studying economics, that was called a monopoly. And what happens in a monopoly? Things cost more.

Alaskans wonder why they’re still paying a dollar more per gallon for gasoline refined in their very own state from oil produced in their very own state. In Fairbanks, they even convinced themselves the answer was to raise taxes on the oil companies — as if that would bring gas prices down.

Maybe if more than one entity owned that oil, things would be different.

Speaker John A. Boehner, under intense pressure from conservatives in his party, will resign one of the most powerful positions in government and give up his House seat at the end of October, throwing Congress into chaos [as] it tries to avert a government shutdown.

Mr. Boehner made the announcement in an emotional meeting with his fellow Republicans Friday morning.

The Republican from Ohio had struggled from almost the moment he took the speaker’s gavel in 2011 to manage the challenges of divided government and the hold together his fractious and increasingly conservative Republican members.

He was never fit for the speakership, and I like many fear his influence has left almost no one fit for the job in line for it.

Curious what’s led him to this decision. I know what a lot of his critics will conclude, but I don’t like the blackmail explanation here anymore than I do regarding Chief Justice Roberts. It’s not that big a stretch to assume that a GOP essentially led by the likes of Karl Rove managed at exactly the wrong time to elevate dim, weak men to what would become its highest offices during the Obama era.

It’s happened before. Weak men do like to try to have it both ways, and weak men do crack under the strain of trying to have it both ways when the rest of the world loses patience.

Scott Walker is out. He, Rick Perry (who already dropped out) and Bobby Jindal were the only governors running for president that I didn’t despise.

Yes, I just gave Bobby a few bucks, he being the last one standing.

If he falls, I’ll have to choose between Ted Cruz, Carly Fiorina, and Ben Carson. As much as I like Cruz, the last sitting U.S. Senator we put in the White House makes me leery of doing it again so soon.

We need a constitutional amendment prohibiting presidential campaign activities and fundraising more than six months before the November election. When you set out to separate the wheat from the chaff, and end up with only chaff, you’re doing something wrong.

A while ago — about the same time this blog became my domain home page — I signed up for Google Apps so I could manage my domain email right in Gmail, rather than just forwarding it to a whole separate address to take advantage of Gmail’s features and capabilities.

I’m saving some $75 a year on this deal, but the mail part has proven to be a major headache because if your Gmail address doesn’t end in gmail.com, the Gmail mobile app will only manage it if you set it up as an IMAP account — the kind where messages get moved into folders rather than labeled. When folders are used, a message can only be in one at a time; to use more than one folder you have to make multiple copies of the same message.

Gmail’s labels are a much more flexible system. Instead of a file-folder analog like IMAP, search giant Google’s Gmail operates, naturally enough, on a database principle. You could create 100 labels, put them all on just one message, and find it under all of the labels — while still having only one copy of the message on the server. Other mail systems should adopt it.

But I can only take full advantage of Gmail’s features through Gmail’s webmail interface.

You’d think Google would design its mail app to treat a Google Apps mail account like any other Gmail account. The webmail interface does it without any trouble, so why can’t the app?

From what I’ve read, Google Apps users with non-Gmail, domain addresses used to have to use Microsoft’s Outlook mobile app to manage their email. How stupid is that? It’s undoubtedly a big part of why Gmail finally turned their app into an IMAP-capable mail client, but it’s hard to understand why they couldn’t simply have the apps recognize Google Apps mail accounts as Gmail addresses? It’s far more sensible.

Anyway, the last two versions of Gmail’s Android app have been failing epically even for users with ordinary Gmail addresses. So I’ve disabled the Gmail apps on my phone and tablet, and placed web shortcuts on my homescreen. I’ll use my mobile browser to manage my email when I’m not at my Windows PC.

Absolutely ridiculous.

Updated, Monday: I just discovered that Microsoft’s Outlook mail app can set up my domained Google Apps account as Gmail. Google’s own Gmail app can’t.

The ridiculousness is even more absolute than I thought.

Reupdated, October 14: Turns out Google “Inbox,” which Google claims isn’t an attempt to replace Gmail, does sync my email as a Gmail address rather than IMAP — but the multiple labeling capability isn’t available in Inbox — which makes it no better than an IMAP app. They released an updated Gmail app in the last few days but it still doesn’t accord full Gmail functionality to non-Gmail-domained Google Apps email addresses and it reintroduces an earlier bug of creating spurious IMAP labels for standard mail folders like Sent.

There must be a serious fundamental code failure in the app if they can’t find and fix these flaws.

Anyway, I’m using Gmail’s web interface on all devices — the non-mobile version which, on my phone, is extremely small, but at least displays messages correctly unlike the mobile version. One of my complaints about the newer phone is it won’t display the desktop version of Gmail no matter what.

The house was surrounded mainly by camellia bushes, with an orange tree and a grapefruit tree in the back yard, and a gardenia bush under the grapefruit tree — neither they nor the loquat tree were deciduous. We also had peach, plum, nectarine, apricot, cherry and cherry-plum trees, but I don’t recall noticing them turning color in the fall. Nor our fig trees, though they were behind the detached garage, or our neighbor’s avocado tree.

We had as dizzying an array of California-type arbory as one suburban lot could hold, and we enjoyed the fruits (ahem) for 14 years. The most telling sign of fall for me was the faint smoky smell and slight golden sun haze resulting from the burning of rice fields outside town (a practice long since outlawed). Even the sycamore and fruitless mulberry trees I knew elsewhere didn’t put on much of a show.

It wasn’t until I moved to Fairbanks, Alaska that fall color was abundant and abrupt. Varying a little each year, there was always about a week in September that the hillsides north and west of the city were uniformly golden. When we bought a house in what I called “greater North Pole,” we were in the midst of the Interior’s boreal forest and the season of color couldn’t be missed.

Of course that meant that for a few weeks between the dropping of the leaves — and they fell as abruptly as they had turned — and the first layer of the coming winter’s snowpack, came the Interior’s darkest season; the summer’s continuous daylight was gone, the trees no longer held the last golden glow of twilight nor reflected house or yard lights, and the ground, though carpeted with leaves, was downright gloomy compared to the gleaming white it would be by the end of October.

Here in metro Atlanta, we do get a definite color season, much longer than that enjoyed in the far North, and more gradual. Different species of tree have their different schedules. Some stands of Bradford pear, for example, turn abruptly red before the casual eye notices any other changes — other stands wait longer. Meanwhile though, individual leaves on dogwoods may be showing red, or there may be yellow leaves here and there on the poplars and sweetgums.

We’re in the earliest phases now, with the sparsest hints of color to come seen on scattered trees in the woods of McGehee’s Freehold. If any Bradford pear trees have begun to turn I haven’t seen it yet, but I’m keeping an eye out. Fairbanks has had its golden hillsides for several days now, but they may have snow before our trees down here are fully involved.

(Note: the fall-themed background image currently — today, and until winter — gracing this site was taken by Mrs. McG on our September 2004 visit to Fairbanks five years after moving away. We were on Chena Hot Springs Road, and the view is westward toward, I believe, Ester Dome.)

Some — a very few — of the trees are starting to turn hereabouts, and even though it’s after ten in the morning Mrs. McG’s weather station is reporting that the outside temperature is in the mid-50s.

In subtropical west Georgia, with the equinox still more than a week away.

Living here, fall is unchallenged as my favorite time of year — if only because winter is so often disappointing, and when we do get winter weather around here I’m as trapped at home as anyone because if I were to venture out it wouldn’t matter how well I can drive in the snow if the next guy coming the other way can’t.

Where fall brings mixed feelings, it’s because the subsequent winter will certainly be harsh — but that also makes it a known quantity to almost everyone who lives there, and they’ll at least know how to drive in it.